Our Favorite Whiteboards of 2016…So Far!

Summer’s now behind us, and with that being said, 2017 is just around the corner! It’s been an outstanding year so far for the Magnatag team, with hundreds of custom boards coming through our manufacturing and shipping facility in the past 9 months, ranging from patient bedside boards for hospitals to tactical maps used by branches of the US government. For this week’s whiteboard Friday, we decided to show you a few of the more new and unique custom board layouts our design team has done for customers who needed special features to communicate their message.

This first design is a reimagining of our traditional patient bedside board. While many healthcare facilities use bedside boards to enhance communication between patients, their families, and hospital staff, this particular board was designed to include a Wong Baker pain scale and an hour by hour daily agenda. Our designers completely overhauled the layout of this bedside board by placing a 24 hour treatment schedule along the right side of the whiteboard, in addition to allocating the bottom third to strictly patient-to-staff communication. Also involved in the planning process of this whiteboard, was the decision to add icons/symbols to make headlines easier to understand from a distance. With charge nurses frequently poking their heads in and out of multiple rooms within a short period of time, the hospital wanted to ensure that every headline was easily readable and standardized for accessibility purposes.

We also receive a large quantity of custom board requests from members of the US Military. This magnetic dry erase board was designed completely from scratch to acting as a centralized hub for a local Coast Guard division. The ranking officer that commissioned the design was looking for a solution to help inform both incoming and outgoing crew members of the current conditions, procedures and missions for the day. Since the safety of a large number of people was at stake, this design went through multiple iterations by our design team until everything was perfect.

Our customers frequently purchase our standard KPI whiteboards and their red/green flip-over triangle signals to help track and communicate performance in their factories throughout a set period of time. Derived from Magnatag’s traditional KPI Triangle Scoreboard, this custom dry erase board uses the same red/green double-sided magnetic triangles to show compliance, but it varies from its stock counterpart by featuring a unique layout used for tracking multiple shifts with the help of changeable KPI’s and points of contact for each metric. KPI scoreboards are typically used to track a specific goal—like safety, job orders, and production efficiency. However, in this production facility, management’s ultimate goal was to implement a method for tracking a variety of metrics related to process improvement. They created a whiteboard design that tracked activity from four shifts each following a day and night cycle. Individual shifts are labeled by their corresponding letter (A, B, C, D) with the day and night cycles appearing within the KPI star (labeled D1, N1, D2, N2 etc.) The left side of the board was left untouched intentionally, to provide management with a workspace for 5 why and root cause problem solving.

Speaking of 5 Why, this whiteboard design was created to help facilitate that popular problem solving method. There are many variations to the 5 why methodology, and this board simply built upon the concept. In this case our customer wanted an easy to understand and flexible format. The left side of the board is designated for the 5 Why process, indicating a specific issue that occurred on the shop floor and granting a workspace for management to find the proper solution. Since the 5 Why process is only one form of root cause analysis, this engineer wanted to create a workspace that could highlight multiple issues within their manufacturing cycle. That’s why the right side of the board is broken down into six key components of the company’s manufacturing operations: measurement, methods, environment, machines, manpower, and materials. This layout allows management to isolate specific areas of their supply chain where hiccups frequently occurred and illustrate their affect on the production process. The left side works as a tool for one-on-one problem solving that isolates a specific issue, while the right offers a workstation that illustrates issues from a big picture perspective.

Our team loves working on custom boards. We are not Nurse Managers, Emergency First Responders or Manufacturing engineers, but we know how to communicate using whiteboards and get great satisfaction when your design is completed, delivered and your expectations are exceeded. If you are in the market for a custom dry erase board of your own, visit our site to receive a free quote!